Tag clouds with a silver dollar lining

Simon Barratt and I share a fascination with flickr's tag clouds. While corporations struggle with creating management information dashboards that dip into their structured databases, startup flickr (a photo sharing website now taken over by Yahoo) sported from the outset a dashboard summarising millions of pieces of unstructured data.
Flickr members are free to attach tags to their photos: any words they choose in any language. From the millions of decisions emerge a pattern, and by providing three views with different time spans it is possible to spot emerging trends of what is being photographed around the world. Variations in font size relay information about the frequency of a particular tag. Right now, for example, references to yesterday's eclipse figure highly amongst the most recent tags.
There are other areas where there is a need to summarise unstructured data. Customer feedback is an example. Most call centres have a list of categories set up to describe an individual piece of feedback, but how can you spot something new if the categories are predetermined? If the call centre agent (or the customer herself in the case of a web based interface) was able to attach a few descriptive words to each call, that information could be summarised as a tag cloud. A single glance at the tag cloud and you would be able to tell what your customers, as a group, are telling you.
As the saying goes, buses and problems come in threes: different symptoms may be related to each other, and tag clouds can assist you in spotting causality. Drill down from the overall tag cloud to a cloud of tags that have a particular tag in common. In the flickr eclipse example, drilling down reveals a cluster of photos related to the sun, the moon and astronomy - while another cluster is concerned with a car from Mitsubishi.
Tag clouds for photos has been popularised by flickr, but I believe we will see many more applications both on the web and in companies. The world is full of unstructured content. Tag clouds is a natural evolution for any type of case management system and I would not be surprised to see applications in clinical trials, education, trading in financial instruments, customer relationship management, project management and research.
Anywhere, really, where somebody wants to know what is going on and there are either no numbers to add up, or the numbers do not tell the whole story.